Food and Drink

The mighty cranberry

If there’s a berry that says “merry”
this time of year it’s the tart and sassy cranberry.

For Canadians, this rich red berry is
so tied to the Thanksgiving-through-Christmas holiday loop that I vote for the
cranberry as all-round jolly holiday berry, definitely outstripping the holly
berry which, in the gastronomical department, only delights wild birds.

Even their colour cycle — white
when unripe and red when ripe —

makes cranberries ideal holiday
berries.

Another reason to trumpet the
cranberry: the Lower Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island make B.C. the number
one producer of cranberries in Canada. Combined, the two regions grow about
840,000 barrels annually (one barrel weighs 100 pounds). Now that’s a lot of
cranberry sauce.

However, worldwide the U.S. rules,
with more than 80 per cent of cranberries coming from there, primarily
Massachusetts and Wisconsin. Still, Canada ranks a respectable second, with
Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec helping B.C. account for about 14 per cent of
world production. The rest of commercial cranberry production comes from
countries in Borat’s corner of the world: Latvia, Belarus, Azerbaijan and the
Ukraine.

This pretty much aligns with
cranberries’ original habitat. Commercial crops grown in North America are all
variants of
Vaccinium macrocarpon
, a
member of the heath family native to acidic bogs and peaty wetlands in the
northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada. It’s also cousin to other low,
evergreen creeping shrubs like the lingonberry and small cranberry (
V.
oxycoccus
). The latter is the European
cranberry, found in the likes of Latvia or Belarus with its stronger, grassier
flavour.

Cranberries have been eaten by
aboriginal people for ages. In fact, we newcomers to North America supposedly
had our first taste when starving colonists in Massachusetts were given some by
generous locals. After that they incorporated cranberries into Thanksgiving
dinners and long threaded strings for the Christmas tree. (If you have a minute
and a bag of fresh cranberries, get a big needle and some thread and try it
— they’re a treat to make, mainly because the ripe, fresh berries are so
beautiful to handle.)

In North America and Europe,
cranberries have been wild-harvested for centuries. A gaggle of long-skirted
women on their knees are featured in Eastman Johnson’s 1880s painting, “The
Cranberry Harvest on the Island of Nantucket.” That was before people figured
out how to manage wild stands to increase yields. Eventually, this evolved into
building ditches and dykes for water control, and amazing artificial bogs used
in some places today.